Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  My father brought in a washcloth and my mother lay down on the sofa. “The problem is that everyone’s already dead for you, Abe, don’t you see?” she said. “First Momma and Poppa and then your friends in the Army and now Sheila and soon yourself, if you keep going in the same direction. But when they call on the phone to tell me you’re dead too, it won’t be a big surprise, see? All it will be is a chance for people to say what a big shot you are now, below ground.” She lifted the wash-cloth. There was a tiny piece of white paint stuck to her forehead. “If you were really smart, you wouldn’t give them the satisfaction, that’s all I been trying to tell you. Sometimes you win by losing, yeah? Only you’re too stubborn to see that. Like always. So why be against California? In California we could start all over. In California we could live without being scared for our lives all the time. Only you’re too pigheaded to do it, even though you know I’m right, that it’s our only chance. Even though…” Nobody spoke. “Don’t anybody see that I’m right? Don’t anybody care?”

  “California,” my father said. “That’s all she got on her brain since she’s back. California. The Promised Land. Sure.”

  “So tell me something, Abe darling—is there a law that says we can’t be happy too while we’re still alive?”

  Abe didn’t answer. Instead he bent down and kissed me on the cheek.

  “I’m sorry about before,” he said.

  “That’s okay.”

  He went into the foyer and opened the door. Turkish Sammy was on the landing, waiting for him.

  4

  BEAU JACK was the only person who knew how much I loved Jackie Robinson. Whenever I could get out of our apartment—while Abe had our building guarded—I’d go down to Beau Jack’s and stay with him and we’d talk about Jackie and speculate on how much greater Jackie might have been if he’d been white, if he hadn’t had to wait until the age of twenty-eight to become the first black baseball player in the history of the major leagues.

  I’d begun following Jackie’s career the year before when he was in the minor leagues with Montreal, where he led the league in batting with a .349 average. Beau Jack kept lots of newspaper clippings, and his favorite told about how, long after the final game was over—Montreal beat Louisville in the Little World Series, with Jackie scoring the winning run—when Jackie was the last player to leave the dressing room, the crowd was still there, waiting for him. They hugged him and kissed him and cheered for him and chased him through the streets of the city. It was probably the first time in history, Beau Jack said, that a black man had run from a white mob, not because it hated him, but because it loved him.

  Sometimes Beau Jack would tease me.

  “You think just because I’m a colored man and Jackie’s a colored man that I care more about him than the other players, don’t you?”

  “I suppose.”

  He’d wait a few seconds. “Well,” he’d say, a faint smile on his lips. “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “You’re right. I care more about that pigeon-toed black man than any player ever lived!”

  I knew everything about Jackie Robinson there was to know. He was born on January 31, 1919, in Cairo, Georgia. His full name was John Roosevelt Robinson and he was the youngest of five children. For many years Jackie told others that his father died a year after he was born, but the truth was that Jackie’s father, who worked as a sharecropper for twelve dollars a month, ran off with a neighbor’s wife six months after Jackie’s birth. The plantation owner blamed Jackie’s mother and ordered her off the land, so she sold what possessions they had and took her family across the country to California, where she had a brother, Jackie’s uncle Burton. In her new life, washing and ironing for white people, Jackie’s mother was up before daylight and home after sundown. Sometimes the family lived on nothing but old bread and Sweetwater. During these years, Jackie’s mother sustained herself with the dream that all her children might one day be able to go to school.

  When Jackie was a boy he belonged to a gang made up of blacks, Japanese, and Mexicans called the Pepper Street Gang. They weren’t allowed to swim and play ball where whites could. Instead they roamed the streets, stealing from local stores, getting into trouble with the police. By the time Jackie was in high school he had few friends his own age. He was close to three older men, though: his minister Karl Downs, who took him out of gangs and brought him into church life and athletics; and his two brothers—Mack, who was a great track star and Jackie’s coach, and Frank, who was his best friend.

  In 1936, despite a heart condition, Mack went to Berlin and came in second to Jesse Owens in the Olympics. Soon after, while starring in football, baseball, basketball and track at Pasadena Junior College, Jackie broke Mack’s broad jump record. Dozens of four-year colleges recruited him but he decided to go to U.C.L.A. so that he could be close to home. In the fall of 1938, however, shortly after he enrolled there, Frank was killed in a motorcycle accident. Not long after that Jackie met Rachel Isum. Although he fell in love with her at once—they became especially close during the months following the death of Rachel’s father—they did not marry until almost a decade later.

  In all the articles I read, Jackie rarely spoke of his feelings. It bothered me that I knew so much about his athletic career and so little about the rest of his life. I wanted to know what he’d felt when he was a boy my age. I wanted to know what he felt during all the years he had to hold back his true feelings—during all the years he had to live, day after day, believing he would never reach the major leagues. But whenever I’d ask Beau Jack about Jackie’s childhood, hoping he could fill in the details of what it was like to be a young black boy growing up in America, he would never say much.

  Beau Jack had no trouble talking about the facts of Jackie’s career, or about the Negro Baseball Leagues and the great players he’d seen, or even about his life as a soldier during World War I. Although he could give me all the details I wanted about what the war had been like—stories of trench warfare and hand-to-hand combat, of cantonment cities and potato-masher grenades and mustard gas and redoubt lines and bolo knives and rolling barrages—he never talked about his life before the First World War. I had the feeling that he didn’t want to live through those years—not even in his memory—ever again, and that nothing in his adult life could ever be as painful as an ordinary day of his childhood had been. How helpless and ashamed he must have felt, I thought.

  He spoke in a slightly slurred way that made me think he grew up in the South, but I didn’t know for sure. He never mentioned any family he had, or friends; he never had visitors or went on trips. And yet I knew this was a large part of what made it so easy for me when I was with him. He seemed to have come from nowhere. He was the only person I knew who needed no other life than the one in which he was living.

  It made him happy, too, to have me come down and visit with him, even if we just sat in his kitchen together doing nothing, just being quiet with one another. We’d listen to ball games on the radio, or talk about Jackie, or about different people in the building, or he’d ask me about school, or I’d ask him to tell me about the First World War—but when we weren’t talking it never bothered me to just sit with him and sip a Coke and pet Kate and let time drift by.

  Sometimes, if he had to go to an apartment to put up a cabinet, or fix a refrigerator or a sink or a toilet, or if somebody’s door buzzer was jammed, he’d leave me by myself. I’d take off my sneakers and rest my bare feet on Kate’s warm body and I’d feel far away from everything and everyone. Sometimes when he was gone I wondered if Beau Jack was real, or if I’d merely invented him. I thought often of asking him to let me draw his portrait. Sometimes when I stared at him, tracing the bones under his skin with my eyes, I ached to be able to make his face come to life on a piece of blank paper. I loved all the different colors I saw in the brown of his skin. What I couldn’t figure out, though, was how to transform those colors into grays and whites. When I thought of trying to get everything I
saw into a portrait—all the different hues: the slight redness, like sunburn, at the cheekbones; the purple that seemed to lie beneath the brown like grape-stain; the pitted black pockmarks along his cheeks and chin; the flat orange-brown near his hairline; the marbled tans and pinks around his missing ear; the smooth gleaming chestnut of his neck—I worried that I would just wind up with a dark, confusing mess. I wanted to be able to draw each pore of his skin, each hair, each wrinkle—to see what no painting or photograph could see—and because I didn’t see how it would ever be possible, and because I even began to wonder if what I saw inside my head was actually there, I chose to do nothing. I knew I could have drawn his features and gotten them right, the same way I copied out pictures of Jackie from magazines—Jackie’s full, thick lips, his lamb’s wool hair, his broad, flat nose, his dimpled chin, his soft almond eyes—but without shading in the skin I was afraid I would never be able to suggest the way the darker colors underneath shone through to the surface.

  After U.C.L.A., where Jackie was an All-American basketball player, the N.C.A.A. broad jump champion, and, in football, the leading ground-gainer in the country with an average of twelve yards a carry, he went to Hawaii and worked for a construction company near Pearl Harbor while playing football for the Honolulu Bears. In the spring of 1942 he was drafted into the Army and sent to Fort Riley, Kansas, where he went to Officer’s Candidate School and became a Second Lieutenant, a Morale Officer in charge of an all-black truck battalion. He was transferred from Fort Riley to Fort Hood, in Texas, and then to Camp Breckenridge in Kentucky, where a friend who’d been a member of the Kansas City Monarchs, in the Negro Baseball Leagues, told Jackie that the Monarchs were looking for players.

  After Jackie received his honorable discharge in November 1944, he wrote to the Monarchs. They gave him a tryout, then offered him a job at four hundred dollars a month. Jackie was happy. When the season began in 1945, though, and Jackie saw what his future would be like—a fatiguing, humiliating life of traveling from city to city by bus, of never eating or sleeping well, of never getting the rewards and recognition that white players received in their leagues—he became bitter and discouraged. But if he left baseball, where could he go, and what could he do to earn enough money to help his mother, or to be able to marry Rachel?

  The answer came in August 1945, when Branch Rickey, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, sent Clyde Sukeforth to see Jackie. Sukeforth, one of Rickey’s scouts, told Jackie that Rickey was looking for players for a Negro team to be called the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers and he persuaded Jackie to come to Brooklyn for an interview.

  “The truth,” Rickey said, the first time he and Jackie met, “is that you are not a candidate for the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers. I’ve sent for you because I’m interested in you as a candidate for the Brooklyn National League Club. I think you can play in the major leagues.”

  They talked more and Rickey, an elderly, churchgoing man who didn’t smoke or drink or swear and who would not even attend his own team’s games on Sunday, told Jackie a story.

  In 1910 Rickey was a coach for the Ohio Wesleyan team. The team went to South Bend, Indiana, to play against Notre Dame, and the hotel refused to let one of the team’s players, a black named Charley Thomas, register. There were no black hotels in South Bend and Rickey talked the hotel manager into letting Charley Thomas sleep on a cot in Rickey’s room. Instead of sleeping, Charley Thomas sat without speaking on the edge of the cot. Then he began to cry and shake, to tear at one hand with the other, as if he were trying to scratch his skin off with his fingernails. Rickey asked him what he was doing.

  “It’s my hands,” Charley Thomas sobbed. “They’re black. If only they were white, I’d be as good as anybody then, wouldn’t I, Mr. Rickey? If only they were white!”

  “Charley,” Rickey said. “The day will come when they won’t have to be white.”

  Rickey told Jackie that he would have to play for Montreal in the International League for a year. He told him that he knew Jackie was a fierce competitor. He liked that. But if the great experiment, as he called it, was to work, Jackie would have to control his temper and take a lot of abuse. He would be the object of beanballs and spikings, curses and name-calling.

  “Mr. Rickey,” Jackie asked angrily, “are you looking for a Negro who is afraid to fight back?”

  For the first time, Rickey exploded. “Robinson,” he replied, “I’m looking for a ball player with guts enough not to fight back.”

  When, afterwards, Rickey was proven right—when pitchers threw at Jackie’s head, when fans called him nigger, when bus drivers made him sit in the backs of buses, when hotels turned him away, when restaurants made him get his meals in paper bags at back doors, when his own teammates wrote petitions to Rickey declaring that they would not play if Jackie did—Jackie kept his part of the bargain: he took all the jeers and taunts and insults, all the hatred and injustice, and he didn’t fight back, he didn’t show his anger.

  Whenever Jackie would come to bat and get a hit, or when he’d make a spectacular play in the field, or steal a base, my heart would swell and inside my head I’d be screaming Good for you, Jackie! Good for you— you show the bastards!—and I’d have to fight to hold my tears back, to keep my feelings inside.

  I imagined Rachel comforting Jackie at night, his head on her bosom, her stroking his hair and forehead, kissing his eyes. I thought of how she must have wept inside herself because she alone knew how helpless Jackie felt—how much strength it took for a man of his courage not to fight back. Whenever I went to a game with my father or Abe or my friends, I’d look for Rachel and Jack Junior—their first child, born the previous year—in the box seats behind home plate, where the Dodger wives sat. Mostly, though, I’d keep my eye on Jackie and try to bore my thoughts into his skull so that I could feel exactly what he was feeling. When he knocked the dirt from his spikes with the end of the bat and took a practice swing, eyeing the pitcher, did he think of his childhood then? When a pitcher dusted him off or a catcher called him nigger, did he escape then by letting his mind remember those parts of his childhood that he never spoke about? If you’d had a miserable childhood, could you still love it and dwell on parts of it simply because it was yours?

  Once, when I was at a Dodger-Cardinal game, I could tell from the way Jackie stared into the Cardinal dugout that they were riding him. Earlier in the season the Cardinals had threatened to go out on strike rather than play against Jackie, but baseball Commissioner Frick warned that he was willing to wreck the entire National League if he had to, in order to protect Jackie’s right to play. The Cardinals called off the strike. Now, with Cardinal runners on first and second, I saw that the players had turned their attention to the Dodger shortstop, Pee Wee Reese. I stared at their mouths. They were calling Reese, a southerner from Louisville, a nigger lover. Jackie kicked at the dirt around first base and pounded his glove. Reese called to the umpire for time-out and motioned to Jackie. They walked toward the pitcher’s mound and the Cardinal players came out of the dugout, onto the steps, and razzed Reese some more. Reese looked up, smiled at them, and then, as if it were the easiest thing in the world, he reached over and put his arm around Jackie’s shoulder, the way any player would. The jeering stopped. Reese slipped his glove down along his wrist, rubbed up the ball for the pitcher, tossed it back to him. Jackie nodded to Reese, retreated to first base. My fists were clenched as tight as I could get them. I didn’t tell anybody what I felt.

  Beau Jack liked stories about hunting and fishing, and I’d read through his magazines—National Geographic and Argosy and Field and Stream and The Police Gazette—and we’d talk about the pictures and the stories. Sometimes he talked about hunting and fishing in the sewers of Brooklyn, about the alligators and crocodiles that supposedly lived below the city, set loose there by people who’d kept them as pets in fish tanks. In one of his magazines there was a story about unwanted babies being dropped into sewers or flushed down toilets—black and Puerto Rican children born to
unwed thirteen- or fourteen-year-old mothers—and Beau Jack believed the stories. He never smiled when he talked about the wild children who might be growing up in sewer tunnels, roaming the city underground like packs of wolves.

  Beau Jack also got the Daily News and Daily Mirror and I’d read through them, starting at the back with the sports pages. I knew Beau Jack didn’t like my uncle, so I wasn’t surprised when he gave me the Mirror one morning folded open to an article on page three about the gang wars my uncle was supposedly involved in. According to the article there were carloads of hired thugs riding around Brooklyn shooting at one another. The article said that residents in several Brooklyn neighborhoods were afraid to go out into the streets. The Brooklyn District Attorney promised that, using whatever means he had to, he was going to gather enough evidence to end the reign of terror that the rival gangs were inflicting on innocent citizens.

  Everything was so quiet in Beau Jack’s apartment below ground that it was hard for me to believe that in the world outside our building cars were actually rolling along streets in the broiling heat, full of men with loaded guns. When I imagined the cars cruising up and down half-empty streets and when I saw pictures in my head of Little Benny and Avie Gornik and the others staring out of car windows, tommy guns and .45s on their laps, the pictures came to me without sound—as if I were watching a silent movie, as if I were deaf.

  When I went upstairs late that afternoon, my mother was in her bedroom, asleep on top of the bedspread, nothing but a washcloth over her eyes, a yellow towel across the middle of her body. I tiptoed into the kitchen and telephoned Tony Cremona.

  “What do you want?” He sounded angry.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just to talk. I’ve been cooped up in my building for over a week now. I just wanted to talk to somebody.”

  “I think you chose the wrong guy. Your uncle finds out, he’ll cut your cork off.”